Mike Berman's Random Thoughts and Opinions

Friday, December 18, 2015

Constructive Feedback

Here is something that nobody knows about me. When giving "constructive criticism" to an employee on my team, or a co-worker, I will never do it on a Friday afternoon. I will always wait until Monday. You may be wondering why.

When I was working my first job back in 1993, I was learning the ropes as the low man on the totem pole. There were a few different managers who would give me work to do, and teach me about it. One time I was running a job on a Friday afternoon, which I finished and then gave to one of my supervisors for review. On her way out for the weekend, she left it back on my desk with a note that I had used the wrong discount rate by mistake and the job would have to be re-run. My interpretation of the note was that she was bitter and disappointed. Rather than just re-running the job and forgetting about it, I ended up internalizing it and it ruined my weekend. I was wondering how mad she was going to be on Monday morning. Of course, by Monday morning she had already forgotten about it. I had unnecessarily stewed about it for two days.

Anyhow, ever since then it has been my policy to delay any negative feedback until Monday. There is no reason to deprive someone from enjoying their weekend.

Monday, December 14, 2015

Values

I have had some time this year to re-dedicate myself to certain activities. After taking several classes, , losing weight, and setting up my daily and recurring habit/task system, the next question to ask was "what things are important to me?". This will help me determine where I want to focus my time, toward achieving these goals.

So I found an exhaustive list of values, and went through them to identify which ones I feel are most important to me. This was a very difficult exercise, since there are 418 goals on the list, each of which are worthy endeavors. But I went through and tried to isolate those that really resonated with me. These selections will differ from what other people would choose. So here are the 68 values that I selected (with the ones that are duplicates grouped together):